Articles tagged with: fan-owned clubs

Some things to bear in mind before publicly announcing you think politics have no place in football, courtesy of the excellent Llandudno Jet Set:
The parts of the internet that have held my recent attention have …

One of FC United of Manchester’s Course You Can Malcolm collective has sent us the following for publication on their behalf:
‘Twenty-two is a number that found its spiritual home at Course You Can Malcolm.
Whereas bingo …

‘it is a good plan…to have one side with striped jerseys of one colour say red; and the other with another say blue. This prevents confusion and wild attempts to wrest the ball from your neighbour.’
At first it was an urban museum, not so much a museum as a place to poke your eyes out.

Press release issued at 00:01 hrs on 16 March 2012
Supporters of fan-owned, co-operative football club FC United of Manchester are celebrating today after raising over £1.6m from a community share issue to help fund a …

According to numerous media sources, St Pauli fans had clashed with rival fans of VFL Lübeck and the police, leading to the cancellation of this long running tournament. Just blanket coverage, ignoring many important details of what actually happened, meant my colleagues thought that I was spreading the “English disease”. They though that those St Pauli “rowdies” were at it again.

There will be an indepth piece, with pictures, about the situation at St Pauli in the February issue of A fine lung. But for now, here is a piece from the FCUMAD site about St Pauli fans’ anti-commercialism protests at the weekend, including the Bring back St Pauli campaign:

Now being a resident in Germany and choosing to spend a large chunk of my free time caught up in the affairs of FC St Pauli, I have occasionally had the odd email or question when back in Manchester, about how fans have an influence on the club in comparison to our own system.

There’s a song at FC United, I don’t know the exact words, as I don’t want to be disappointed, but the gist of it involves a celebration of us building our home in Newton Heath to the tune of Dirty Old Town.

It’s nice that we have a refrain to that tune, even if the words are probably a bit cringeworthy given the past form of some of our songsters, but unless we all pull our fingers out it may become redundant before it becomes a permanent fixture on the set list.

“We are offering supporters and others the chance to be part of this exciting development and help make football history. This is a landmark opportunity to invest in a club bringing football back to the heart of its communities and leave a lasting legacy for future generations.”

St Pauli fans found their way to the pub and asked the landlord to turn the music off, as they wanted to hear us louder. They came over and joined in as we sang ‘We’re the famous Man United and we’re going to St Pauli…’

Football’s power-brokers would have us believe that fans can’t own and run clubs with any kind of success. Supporter ownership doesn’t work, so they say. Yet figures released today show that Europe’s second richest club and current champions of the continent are fan-owned and, furthermore, there are five other supporter-owned clubs in the top 20 list.

Manchester United, meanwhile, have been completely overtaken and reside in third place. The Glazers and chief bum-chum Gill will blame exchange rates and stuff but facts don’t lie boys.

By John Ludden
Ever since British European Flight 609 careered off the end of Munich runway and killed outright seven Manchester United footballers and many other poor souls on board, the amount of tears shed for …

By John Ludden
Ever since British European Flight 609 careered off the end of Munich runway and killed outright seven Manchester United footballers and many other poor souls on board, the amount of tears shed for …

On arrival at the ground Murphy thought briefly how quiet the place seemed compared to normal and headed to his office. It was only when there that the dreadful news was relayed to him by Alma George, his secretary.

If you’ve dedicated your life to eleven ball-chasing men, chances are you’ll know it gets a bit taters watching them in the autumn and winter months. Not quite Jose Mourinho leaving Bastian Schweinsteiger off his …

Following the news that the Tulisa Contostavlos trial collapsed after the judge said he had ‘strong grounds to believe’ Sun reporter Mazher Mahmood lied at the hearing, we thought it worth looking back on this ace piece from our site a while back…